Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of…

Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we were trapped by an ideology of tax-as-theft and government-as-oppression. Short 🧵/1 https://t.co/mxd5oGGzw5

Looking a bit more at this graph. Obviously astronomical spending in the world wars. But even more interesting is how quickly the debt fell away, after them. The wars triggered massive ongoing public investment, in manufacturing and other areas, like housing. /2 https://t.co/JhwVGSzLqo

Triangulating against GDP tells even more of the story. What followed the last world war was decades of prosperity. Boom times. To add history back to economics, as well as politics, you could say wars and pandemics are largely caused by the ‘economic’ strangulation of much…/3 https://t.co/RPb94V05Oa

…of society, and the huge spending then to fight the ensuing wars and pandemics restores prosperity and peace. Which is sort of the situation we’re in right now, except the ‘quality of spend’, as Jim Chalmers calls it, has been poor from the outgoing government. /4

Neoliberal, libertarian conservatives waste money by splashing it about as cash handouts, usually skewed heavily to people who don’t even need them. Rather than investing in public infrastructure, in the broadest meaning of that term. Because they don’t believe the public…/5

…is even a thing. ‘There is no such thing as society, as they like to say. Their passion is to remove the public sphere almost entirely. But really debt and deficits just means holding too much of our wealth in private hands. And settle, this isn’t a socialism or communism…/6

…argument. Just a simple argument about how a society allocates its wealth and resources. I know hard-core capitalists who argue to shift that allocation much more heavily to ordinary people, to ‘customers’ in the economic sense. Not a Marxist bone in their bodies. /7

There is no such thing as ‘business’ (another thread at some point maybe). There are only ever customers. A business can’t survive without customers, but customers can survive without a given business. /end